Radio frequency integrated circuits (herein after RF circuit(s)) design and implementation often results in a long development schedule, high non-reoccurring engineering cost, high engineering costs, high failure rates and low flexibility. Such RF circuits are generally designed, fabricated and tested, often resulting in a process that can span a period of months, such as 18-24 months.
Conventional approaches to address this hurdle include the use of MEMS switches to change amplifier matching for programmable operating frequency bands. Similar conventional approaches provide diode switches or FET switches to provide tunable amplifiers or filters. Switch matrix technology has also been attempted with limited success. All of these aforementioned approaches suffer from various shortcomings. For instance, the switched approach would likely require the various RF functional blocks to operate over very broad bandwidths, or be returned over very broad bandwidths using switches (resulting in poor performance) or switch between numerous narrow band blocks. This becomes very inefficient use of circuit space.
Alternatively, other approaches to address these concerns include using a single wafer mask interconnect layer to connect various circuit functions or individual devices. This approach allows wafers to be particularly processed leaving the final layer or final few layers to be customized. This greatly reduces the design cycle time for development and fabrication. However, this approach still ultimately involves final design at the fabrication level and thus still involves some design and fabrication time. Moreover, the circuit architecture is in a fixed state with fixed circuit properties post fabrication.
Thus, it is desirable to have an RF integrated circuit that overcomes some of these drawbacks. It is further desirable to have a low cost, flexible solution with a range of RF functionality.